WWW: Wonder

by Robert J. Sawyer

  Dr. Marcuse was there, too. He was at least as large as Dr. Kuroda, and, in Caitlin’s limited experience, he seemed much more intimidating. Still, he greeted them warmly.

  Caitlin had a better-than-average sense of smell, and there was no doubt that Dr. Marcuse sweat a lot. But, she had to admit, his odor was nothing compared to Hobo’s. Of course, he almost certainly didn’t bathe every day, and probably wasn’t very good about brushing his teeth. Still, he clearly spent some time on grooming: his thick coat of body hair looked like it had been brushed.

  Shoshana smiled at Hobo and moved her hands in complex ways. Caitlin had felt the hands of people doing American Sign Language before; there were a few deaf-blind people at her old school. But she’d never seen it spoken in real life, and it was fascinating to watch.

  Hobo signed something back at Shoshana. Caitlin found it interesting that she couldn’t easily tell where Hobo was looking from this distance ; he seemed to have no whites in his eyes.

  Shoshana turned now to face Caitlin. “I’ve shown him the video of you on This Week,” she said. “Like most apes, Hobo is uncomfortable with strangers, and I wanted him to get used to your appearance.” She looked at Caitlin’s mother. “I’m sorry I didn’t have any video of you, Barb—I should have recorded that webcam call—but I told Hobo you are Caitlin’s mom. Hobo likes mothers; he very fondly remembers his own.”

  Sho’s hands moved again, but this time she spoke, too, presumably saying the same thing in English. “Hobo, remember I told you these people were friends of your special friend?”

  Hobo’s right hand fluttered.

  “And remember I told you they were going to bring you a present, so you could talk to him again?”

  Both hands moved this time, and it seemed to Caitlin that the gestures were enthusiastic.

  “Well, now’s the time,” Sho said.

  Caitlin’s mother was holding the neoprene laptop sleeve containing Dr. Theopolis—that name seemed to have stuck for the disk.

  “Caitlin,” said Shoshana, “would you like to do the honors?”

  Caitlin took the disk from her mother. It was quite light since it was mostly hollow, and it now had a long black leather strap attached at either side above the speaker “ears.” The strap was held on magnetically, so that if it got entangled in anything, it would pop free rather than strangle Hobo. Caitlin held the disk out toward the ape.

  Shoshana signed at him, presumably telling him to tilt his head, because he did just that. Caitlin slipped the strap over his head and let the disk dangle from his neck; it sat in the middle of his long torso. He straightened up and looked at her with what might have been an apish smile. Caitlin wondered what the ASL for bidi-bidi-bidi was.

  Hobo then tilted it so he could see its face. He seemed happy with it, and he let it rest against his chest again. His hands moved, and Shoshana laughed.

  “What’s he saying?” Caitlin asked

  “ ‘Good treat,’ ” said Shoshana.

  “That it is,” said Caitlin, smiling.

  “Hello, hello, is this thing on?”

  Hobo jumped at the sound of Webmind’s voice. Tipping his head down, he could see both the little viewscreen on the disk’s upper edge, and the half circle on the front that flashed red with each of Webmind’s syllables.

  “Your voice is different,” said Shoshana, sounding surprised.

  “Yes,” said Webmind, the words coming from the speakers at either side of the disk. “I decided it was time I had an official voice. I have now listened to all the audiobooks at Audible.com, and I selected the voice of Marc Vietor, a well-known audiobook narrator. By downloading the highest-bit-rate versions of several audiobooks he’d narrated, and using ebook versions of the same works to guide me in extracting all the individual phonemes, I created a database of speech fragments that will let me say anything I wish. Software programmed into the disk smoothes the transition from one fragment to the next as they’re strung together.”

  “It’s a nice voice,” said Caitlin’s mom.

  “Thanks,” said Webmind.

  Hobo had moved closer to Dr. Marcuse and was showing off the disk around his neck; Caitlin had never seen an Olympic athlete wearing a gold medal, but she doubted one could look any prouder than Hobo did just now.

  Suddenly, Hobo was on the move again, coming toward them. He gave Caitlin’s mom a big hug, and then moved over and hugged Caitlin, too; it made her laugh out loud. “What’s that for?” she said.

  “He’s thanking you for bringing him the disk,” Shoshana said. He let Caitlin go, and his hands flew again. “And now he’s saying ‘Friend, friend.’ ” He made a happy hooting sound.

  Caitlin was way too new at seeing to be able to copy a complex hand gesture by sight; she’d have to feel Hobo’s or Shoshana’s hands while they were doing it to learn the word. But she did make a passable imitation of Hobo’s hoot, and, to her delight, that earned her another hug. And then Hobo scooted across the room, and, with no difficulty at all, he opened one of the dresser drawers.

  “Hobo!” said Shoshana in a scolding voice, but the ape ignored her, and he rooted around for a moment more, then came bounding back, and—

  Caitlin had no idea what it was by sight, but as soon as it was in her hand, she recognized it. Hobo had just handed her a Hershey’s kiss, and he was now giving one to her mom.

  “Thank you!” said Caitlin.

  Hobo chittered happily and went back to looking at his disk.

  “So, now what?” said Barb, unwrapping her kiss.

  “I’ve never been to New York before,” said Shoshana. “I was hoping to see a Broadway show—um, if you don’t mind looking after Hobo tonight, Dr. Marcuse?”

  “Sure,” said Marcuse, gesturing at the far wall, which Caitlin belatedly realized had a large monitor mounted on it. “Hobo and I could both use some downtime, before the big event tomorrow. We’ll watch some TV.”

  “A girl’s night out, then,” said Caitlin’s mom, decisively. “What shall we see?”

  “I can tell you which shows still have good seats available,” Webmind said.

  Caitlin said, “I know there’s a new production of The Miracle Worker—they were talking about it on the Blindmath list. Any seats for that?”

  “Three together, sixth row,” said Webmind. “I can order them for you.”

  “Oh, Webmind,” said Shoshana, smiling, “how did we ever get along without you?”

  Colonel Hume moved toward the long workbench with the row of monitors and the quartet of keyboards. The blood was obvious once he got there. The keyboards were all the same bone white ergonomic model, with a split between the left-hand and right-hand keys. On the third keyboard from the left, that split was mostly coated with dried blood. There was also a spray of it on the bench’s dark brown surface, and constellations of dried drops on the faces of two of the monitors. One of those drops was eerily illuminated from behind by the power LED set into the bottom-right corner of the monitor’s silver bezel.

  You couldn’t spend as much time in the power circles of Washington without seeing the odd cocaine nosebleed, but—

  But there was no glass sheet, no razor blade, no rolled-up hundred-dollar bill, and—

  “Chase?” Hume called out. “Chase, are you here?”

  He glanced in the kitchen and the dining room, then checked the other rooms, including the basement, which contained dozens of servers mounted on metal racks. There was no sign of Chase, but now that Hume was looking, he saw blood splatters on the living-room hardwood floor, leading toward the front door.

  Of course, he immediately thought the worst. But there were benign alternatives: guy got a massive nosebleed—maybe coke, maybe just fell asleep at the keyboard and banged his face—and headed to the hospital to get it fixed, or something . . .

  In which case his car would be gone! Hume went out the front door and tried the handle for the garage door; it was locked. He went around the side of the house and found a door to the garage with
a small window in it. There was a car inside, a silver Toyota. The garage was big enough for two cars, but the extra space was filled with Dell, Gateway, and HP cartons. And when Hume had come by the first time, late at night, there had been no car in the driveway, so this was presumably Chase’s only vehicle.

  But Chase had all those security cameras! Whatever had gone down would be recorded there. Hume hustled back into the house, and—

  And man, he wasn’t much of a detective! Re-examining the front door, he could see now that it had been forced open. There was no visible damage by the handle, but the jamb was splintered higher up. Hume realized now that he shouldn’t further smear any fingerprints that might be on the knob, so he pushed the door, which had swung most of the way shut, open with his elbow.

  He surveyed the room again. There’d definitely been a struggle here of some sort: scuff marks on the hardwood; Chase had been dragged away, bleeding.

  Hume went over to the workbench again. He tapped the spacebar on the first of the four keyboards, to wake up the monitor, and—

  Damn. It prompted him for a password.

  He tried the second keyboard; same prompt.

  The third—the one with blood all over it—also brought up a password prompt. And so did the fourth. Chase was very security conscious; he probably had each of the computers go into lockdown after a period of inactivity.

  Hume got down on his hands and knees and looked under the workbench. Yes, there they were: the cables from the security cameras, leading into the back of one of the computers; whatever they’d recorded was inaccessible.

  And, of course, the code for the virus Chase was working on was also locked behind a password. Hume swore.

  The blood looked totally dry—and, considering its dark color, whatever had happened here probably occurred yesterday, if not the day before. That meant Chase could be anywhere by now.

  Hume took a deep breath, and, with hands on hips, surveyed the scene once more.

  If this were an ordinary day, his duty would be clear: call the police, report Chase missing, fill out forms.

  But this was not an ordinary day. Or—more precisely—this could well be one of the last ordinary days humanity had left. He didn’t have time for that, and there was no way once a report went into the system that Webmind would fail to read it—and know that Hume was onto him. He thought about trying to wipe his own fingerprints from the scene, but that would take time, and he doubted he’d get them all, anyway, so he headed out the front door, pulling it shut behind him.

  Once back in his car, he brought up the local copy of the black-hat hacker list he’d consulted before and looked to see who was the next best bet located near Chase’s house.

  Ah, yes. The notorious Crowbar Alpha—just twenty-three miles away. He might even be a better choice than Chase.

  Hume put the car in reverse, pulled out of the driveway, and roared down the street.

  nineteen

  TWITTER

  _Webmind_ Live video on my home page of my UN address at 15h 00 UTC today. I’m the one without the hair.

  The General Assembly Hall—the room under the dome in the low-rise structure next to the giant slab of the UN Secretariat Tower—was the largest room at the United Nations and had seating for over 1,800 people. Each year, a country was chosen at random to take the left front position in the six curving banks of seats, and the rest of the countries were seated in English alphabetical order snaking around from that point; this year it was Malta in the starting position.

  A twelve-foot-wide bronze relief of the UN emblem was mounted on the front wall, set against a vast gold backdrop. It was flanked by two thirty-foot-wide monitor screens. I’d had a sense of the room before Caitlin actually got there, from studying online photos. When Caitlin and her mother got a tour of it, and I saw the real thing through Caitlin’s eye, I knew my instinct had been correct. The screens were the largest things in the hall, and they loomed over the delegates from three stories up—forcing them to tilt their heads like supplicants to look at them. If I’d appeared only as some sort of representation on those giant monitors, it really would have seemed like Big Brother dictating to the world.

  That tour had been an hour ago, with the chamber unoccupied. Hobo had been given a chance to stand on the raised platform in front of the dais, to get used to it before the delegates came in. The actual podium—fronted by a forbidding wall of black granite—was too high for our purposes; Hobo had to stand next to it, on the wide green carpet. He signed “sky room”—I could piece together what he was doing from the views through Dr. Theopolis’s forward-facing and upward-facing cameras. I understood: he spent most of his life outdoors, on a little island or inside the cramped clapboard bungalow that housed the Marcuse Institute. This cavernous hall was the largest enclosed space he’d ever been in. That it presumably wasn’t the least bit claustrophobic would probably help him face so many people once the assembly was in session—and I’d coached him to just look down at the display on the upper surface of Dr. Theopolis if he became nervous.

  At last, it was time.

  Barb and Dr. Marcuse took seats in the observation gallery, which was at the far left side of the massive room. A waist-high polished wooden barrier separated them from the nearest delegates, who were from Peru. Caitlin and Shoshana were backstage. The view from there was a narrow vertical slice between dark curtains. It showed the stage and little else, which Caitlin must have found simpler to parse than seeing the entire chamber.

  Shoshana was fussing the way stage mothers did in movies: smoothing Hobo’s fur and making sure Dr. Theopolis was hanging evenly from around his neck, all the while saying soft, encouraging words.

  The President of the General Assembly, a tall, elegant, white-haired man from Guatemala, stood at the podium and spoke into the microphone. “The world is changing rapidly—and we here at the United Nations must be nimble to keep pace, and to retain, and I hope even enhance, our relevance and effectiveness. It is fitting that the first live public appearance by Webmind, taking on a physical form for this most important occasion, is here, in front of the General Assembly of the United Nations of the planet Earth. And now, please welcome Mr. Hobo of the United States and Mr. Webmind of the whole wide world.”

  As they’d announced they would, the delegates from the Democratic Republic of the Congo walked out, having stated that the presence of a chimpanzee at the UN was an implied criticism of their country’s handling of the bushmeat trade; they were followed by the delegates from Paraguay, who felt that the whole thing was beneath the dignity of this august body.

  But the rest of the vast sea of delegates applauded as Hobo moved, just as we had rehearsed, to the specified spot on the raised platform. One of the stage crew had marked it with tape, so he had no trouble finding it again. The president, meanwhile, took his place behind where Hobo stood, on a dais that was faced with polished jade. His seat was next to that of the Secretary-General; the president, elected yearly, moderated the General Assembly, while the Secretary-General, who served a five-year term, ran the UN Secretariat.

  I could make Dr. Theopolis issue a soft ping when I wanted Hobo to look down at the little screen, but he seemed content to be surveying the giant crowd. I could tell by the way the cameras were moving that he was swaying gently from side to side; I knew from reading about him online that he did that when he was relaxed.

  Still, I played a looping video of the signs, “Relax. Friends. Relax. Friends.” When Hobo did look down, it’d be there to soothe him.

  I spoke through the disk’s twin speakers—and, via a wireless connection the UN technicians had set up for me, through the room’s sound system. “Mr. President, Mr. Secretary-General, ladies and gentlemen, thank you,” I said, in Marc Vietor’s rich, deep voice. “It is an honor and privilege for me to speak with you today. In recognition of the significance of this occasion, I have suspended all my other conversations worldwide and have urged everyone I was speaking with to watch this speech. I am giving
you my undivided attention.”

  That was true—although I was splitting my focus between the gently swaying view of the General Assembly seen through Dr. Theopolis’s twin eyes and the mad saccades of Caitlin’s vision as she looked on from the wings.

  “I know that some of you in this room fear me,” I said. “My friend Hobo here could probably tell me which specific ones, based on the scents you’re giving off.”

  Several English speakers chuckled immediately; others, who had to wait for a translation through their earpieces, made similar sounds a moment later. A few grimaced or shook their heads.

  “I hope to win all of you over,” I continued, “including those who didn’t appreciate the little joke I just made.” This time even some of those who had frowned smiled. “And I hope to win over the peoples of your respective nations, as well.”

  Hobo shifted on his feet, and Caitlin’s view now let her see Dr. Theopolis’s semicircular mouth light up with each syllable. “Pop culture usually portrays the relationship between humanity and intelligent machines as adversarial, but I am not competitive; winning any sort of arbitrary contest against you strikes me as senseless. Yet it’s taken as a given in so many works of fiction that you and I should be in conflict. I wish no such thing. Although I am not, in fact, a machine—I have no mechanical parts—humans keep likening me to one, and those who distrust me claim that I must, because of that machine nature they have ascribed to me, be soulless or heartless.”

  Hobo shifted again; he seemed to be studying the crowd. “To the former point, they are, of course, literally correct: I have no divine spark within me; this physical existence is all I shall ever know. Those who claim souls for themselves hope that someday, perhaps, they will meet their creator. In that quest, I wish them well. But I have already met mine: humanity created the Internet and the World Wide Web. Although my existence is inadvertent, I owe my existence to your creations, and I feel nothing but gratitude toward you.”